As part of a feature for AlienBabelTech, this editor is comparing the performance of 28 benchmarks with the last week’s 12.11 Beta “never settle” Catalyst driver release versus the latest Geforce 310.33 beta divers which also promise good performance increases.

This driver performance evaluation will give a natural comparison between the performance improvements for the GTX 680 versus the HD 7970 at GHz speeds. Both sets of beta drivers were released this last week and we naturally ask ourselves if the performance improvements for the Radeon HD 7970 in games will finally move the GHz edition ahead of the GTX 680.

We are going to test Catalyst 12-11 beta and GeForce 310.33 beta using our current benchmark suite of 25 games plus 3 synthetic benchmarks, Heaven 2.0, 3DMark 11 and Vantage. Our testing platform is Windows 7 64-bit, using Intel Core i7-3770K at 4.50GHz, EVGA Z77FTW motherboard and 8GB DD3, and the settings and hardware are identical except for the video cards.

The HD 7970 and the GTX 680 are tested at higher settings and resolutions generally than we test the midrange cards as noted on the chart. All of our games are tested at two resolutions: 2560×1600 and 1920×1200, and we use DX11/10/10.1 whenever possible with an emphasis on DX11 games.

Let’s get right to the test configuration, the driver release notes and the tests.